Desperate Dan vs Dennis the Menace

In the mid to late 80s Desperate Dan and Dennis the Menace vied for my attention from the comic book rack at Cherry's Newsagents. A five minute scamper down Boundary Road brought me through the door of the fruity seller of necessaries with my one pound worth of pocket money. Dennis almost always won out and Dan only ever got a look in when I felt rich enough to purchase both The Beano and The Dandy or if The Dandy offered the sweetener of a free lolly.

  I never understood what Dan was desperate about and never felt like I connected with a chubby, unshaven bloke that was older than my dad. His legs were so thin and surely would have struggled to carry his bulky torso. Apparently the 'Desperate' adjective was because of his shady past. When Dan first made his appearance in The Dandy in 1937, he was not the nice cheerful chap we now know him to be, but a desperado on the wrong side of the law. Dennis has never switched sides and joined the softies although modern times have seem him become less of a bully to Walter and his mates and more of a cheeky chap. His bullying did sit a little uncomfortably with me, but I'm not sure depriving him of his pea-shooter can have improved the comic strip.

  Desperate Dan has reached lower levels of desperateness since I left the comics for football magazines. As his 60th birthday approached Dan achieved millionaire status and announced that he was leaving The Dandy to swan around with The Spice Girls. The Spice Girls?! I rarely take the drastic action of combining a question mark with an exclamation mark, but surely Dan and Ginger Spice setting off on a cruise together demands such punctuation extremes. However, I have not reached his desperateness yet. His desperateness lies in the fact that the entire thing was a sham to draw attention to his 60th birthday. I turned thirty last month and it's always nice if people wish you a happy birthday, but I didn't announce that I was jetting off to the Bahamas with Girls Aloud in a desperate grasp for my friends' attention. Few would have believed me I'm sure, but surely no one believed that The Spice Girls had invited a cartoon character on their holidays even if he had recently acquired a large amount of cash. 

  Dennis's iconic red and black hooped jumper, the fact that he's got a pet pig and his slipper-prevention tricks make him infinitely cooler than Desperate Dan. Recent accusations of political correctness are nice soundbites for the media, but Dennis is still doing his stuff while Dan has still [yawn] got his face stuffed in a cow pie. I would still choose The Beano over The Dandy any day.